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general

sodium, travel

The longer I don’t update, the less important it seems, and the more I think I have nothing going on that’s worty of an update. So I’ll randomly try to mention everything that’s going on.

First, I’m going back to Indiana on the 6th, for a week I’ll be flying straight into South Bend (well, via CVG) and staying with Ray the whole time. This is sort of the pre-emptive holiday visit, since I don’t like to fly during the blackout period and I wanted to get a frequent flier ticket. The original plan was to just go to Ray’s and sit around for a week, get caught up on various video games, and not much more. But I will also see the various family factions and I guess have christmas early. So I’ve had to do all of my shopping early, but I did it all on Amazon, so that’s not too bad. I have not thought about the trip at all, so I feel like I should be doing some detailed planning or scheduling, but I realize that it will all be thrown off anyway.

I am on a diet, I guess. I’m having various medical issues I don’t want to discuss here, but I’ve basically got to cut the shit and stop with the sugar, sodium, and fat. So I went to the grocery store today and bought $67 of food that might be healthier for me, provided I don’t eat it all in one sitting out of some sort of starvation kick. Shopping for low-sodium food is imporrible. Everything has a ludicrous amount of sodium. Even those hippy-trippy, east asian, vegan-macro-micro-whatever diets are a total salt bomb. If you have any wise ideas on low-sodium cuisine, get them to me, and fast, because my heart is about ready to explode. Also, I go to a grocery store that’s smaller than the deli section of a Kroger, so the aisles are barely wide enough to walk through, and it makes it hard to study the labels on various foods without getting kicked in the shins by a four-foot-tall Greek woman.

I’ve been very apathetic about the annotated Rumored or the rerelease of Summer Rain, both of which have sort of fallen by the wayside. I got a test print of the Rumored thing, but they messed up the spine and I have another round of hell to go through with them, and I really don’t see the point or feel like it right now. Maybe after the holidays. I have been vaguely been thinking about a new project, but just vaguely.

I just finished SOCOM II on the easy level. It wasn’t too bad, but the last level was actually a bummer. There were much harder levels before that one.

OK, I need to get out of here…

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general

TD

I got a voice mail from Simms last week, when I stepped away from the desk for a second. Tom Donohue died, he said. Tom was a really great guy who worked at a used CD store back in Bloomington, and eventually opened up his own place. Most used CD places in town are just out to rip off students coming in and going out, but he always seemed to give everyone the “friend” rate. He would talk to you about whatever music you were into, if it was the Flaming Lips or the Beatles or Cannibal Corpse or anything else, and he’d know weird trivia or obscure releases better than you would. He always kept aside weird Death Metal when I was into it, and then cheap Zappa stuff when I was into that. He also did a lot with WQAX and WFHB, and sponsored a lot of local bands. He was a class act indeed.

You know, I even mentioned Tom in Summer Rain, because back in the day, I was in his shop constantly. I went in there last August when I was in town for a split second to have lunch with Alana, and I ducked in and said hi. It was good to see him, and now I’m glad I did catch up with him. Anyway, here‘s another tribute to him, courtesy of the IDS.

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Shoe burial ground

I’ve been in overdrive, trying to get the annotated version of Rumored to Exist ready. I have the front cover and back cover designed, and they look cool. The whole book is in FrameMaker, and it’s amazing how smooth things have gone with it. I mean, I use Frame all day long every day, so I should have great faith in its ability, but this project has been wonderful. The footnote numbering problem was a ten second fix; the new template was about five minutes of work; the importing of the document from Word took no time at all. Now I need to finish writing the introduction, and comb through the thing for any style issues, and it will be ready.

Every time I buy new shoes, I do not throw out the old ones, even though I typically wear shoes down to the point where there is a hole all the way through the sole. But I need the backup pair, and there have been many times I’ve bought new shoes that simply didn’t work, and I had to go back to the backups until I could find another store with another shoe that did work. Anyway, today I was sitting in bed and realized I had five identical pairs of white on white Nike Air Force III Mid-height hightops, each right one with a hole right through the toe side of the sole. Each left one was fine. I put them all in a garbage bag and hauled them out – that’s a lot of square feet of space. I wish I could simply replace the soles, but now this paragraph is turning into an Andy Rooney rant, so I’ll shut up.

I have been reading the Chuck Barris book Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and I really like it. I don’t know that I’d like the movie so much, but the book has a certain gritty feel to it that reminds me of Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, Elmore Leonard. I’m pretty far into it, I should finish tomorrow. I got the Bukowski book Open All Night, but that’s a poem book, so it will probably be read random page by random page at night when I can’t sleep. I think the next book is this one on the history and invention of the television, which I got at Strand this weekend, along with the Bukowski and an old book on modern warplanes by Bill Gunston, a book from 1980 full of pictures that I remember from the school’s library, so I figured it was worth the five bucks.

I actually wish I knew anything about Bill Gunston. He published hundreds of these books for Jane’s, and a million other aviation-related magazines. Maybe he’s just a figurehead, or a pseudonym for like a dozen other writers, like Louis Lamour, or Don Pendleton, the “author” of a few thousand Mack Bolan books. Anyway, when I was a kid, I used to eat up any of those airplane books, the ones with tons of photos of planes in action. It’s funny to look at these books now, and see how all of the text in the books has to do with the “looming” war with the USSR, and how various US planes were well-poised against Soviet counterparts. It’s also weird, especially in this book I got yesterday, how the MiGs and other Warsaw Pact planes had very sketchy details; the photos were grainy and improvised, the artists’ renditions were just educated guesses. Of course now, if you flew to Moscow with a suitcase of money, they would practically give you a MiG-25, teach you how to fly it, feed you like a king every day, and let you date their sister. It’s amazing how things change.

Oh, my Latitude laptop died. I should be more pissed about this than I am, but it’s almost a non-issue, given how little I use it. I think the hard drive is fried, or it could just be the registry. I guess I could nuke it and start over, but I don’t feel like messing with it right now.

Okay, I’m done for the night. Time to read for a bit.

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general

projects, sick

Just a quick update. I’m so fucking busy I can’t find enough hours in the day, yet I keep playing SOCOM and I’ve been stuck on the same level since MAY. I could probably draw a map of the whole level and where all of the dudes are hiding in my sleep with my eyes closed (as opposed to that open-eye sort of sleep) and yet I play it twice or three times a day and always get killed at the last screen.

Anyway, two big projects here at home, and both of them are running at the same time, waiting to see which one hits the gate first. One is the glossary, and I am editing it on paper, adding new entries, editing stuff based on comments, and trying to get the text all locked down and in shape. That maybe will take another month, but I am getting bored of it already. Then it needs to be moved to FrameMaker, the cover needs to be designed, and then it will go out. That might or might not happen by the end of the year.

Then Rumored to Exist – there will be an annotated version. I have been working on the annotations for a long time, and they are almost done. It needs an introduction, which I am writing, then it gets into Frame and gets a design and a cover. That might happen first. Both books will be fairly cheap and only available from one online store at the publisher, not from Amazon et al. They will not have a UPC or ISBN or be in Books in Print, but they will be a bit cheaper. And they will be cool! So I am excited about that.

I think I am almost over this cold that has been killing me since I have been back. I do not have a runny nose, but I have a horrific yet productive cough. So maybe that means another day or two and it will be done. I saw an ad on TV for some shit that is supposed to help you not get a cold. It looked like Alka-Seltzer, which would be bad because I am allergic to aspirin, plus that fizzing shit is NASTY. But the ad on TV said no details, and I don’t remember the name of it, either. It would be nice if there was some sort of inhalant that you could take, like maybe before of after you got on the germway (i.e. subway) and it would somehow protect your lung lining so it didn’t immediately absorb all of the vile shit you breathe down there from a 45-minute subway ride. Or maybe I could bring a scuba tank.

That’s all.